Those Tears Aren't Real...

I think a third post about how much fun I'm having in the new EverQuest II expansion might be a bit much, especially seeing as how all I'm really doing is going through the same content over and over. Three max-level crafters now and I'll be doing the fourth as soon as I publish this.

I've been furiously bookmarking news stories recently without ever getting around to posting about any of them so I guess it's time for a quick Friday grab-bag, even if it's only Thursday. If I wait until tomorrow, who knows what else might have happened.

Xyzzysqrl dropped by the comment thread a few days ago to express a certain disquiet about the prospect of a flood of discomfiting AI images in this year's Inventory Full Advent Calendar. (Hmm. Isn't using the name of the blog there a bit like talking about myself in the third person? Bhagpuss isn't sure...) I want to get to the meat of that in a full post at some point but it's not going to be yet a while.

They're Coming For You!

In the meantime, I'm guessing Xyzzy isn't going to be any happier about this latest development...

I think we should take a look at it so we can judge for ourselves.

Betrayed By This Town - Anna Indiana

There's so much to say. Where to begin?

Well, for a start, I'm astonished to see that after almost two weeks the YouTube video has just 14k views. From the NME article, I'd assumed it was some kind of big deal internet sensation. Maybe it is, on X-Twitter, where the original post has nearly eight thousand replies. Apparently YouTube viewers aren't quite as curious - or as outraged.

It's really the comments that are interesting, anyway, not the song, which could hardly be more bland, except for the lyrical content, which is... worrying. People seem to think it either signals the end of human civilization or proves AI is a complete farce. So, the same as usual, then.

The whole thing reminds me so much of the reception mobile phones got in the 1980s. I can remember having conversations in which people talked about this apparently terrifying new concept as if the shoddy, makeshift version they were seeing was the ultimate end-point of technological evolution and that proved... something.  

Obviously, no self-respecting, right-thinking person was going to cart around a clumsy object the size and weight of a house-brick, just so they could yell "I'm on a train!" over and over again, until one of their equally shallow, dim-witted friends gave them the validation they so pathetically desired

Well, we all know how that turned out, don't we? Then again,on the other hand, VR...

I just thought I'd mention it because I'm pretty sure AI is going to be more smartphone than VR Headset so it's probably best to pay attention. What's the point of having a blog, anyway, if it isn't to put down markers so you can say "I told you so" later? 

Also, I hesitate to say it, but that chorus is kind of catchy... 

Betrayed By This Town - Connie Connecticut 

See? Now you get it!

If Tolkein Had Never Seen The Cotswolds...

... or you wait all decade for a non-Western fantasy setting and then three come along at once.

The big ticket in this event was the Early Access release of The Wagadu Chronicles. This sandbox mmorpg funded on Kickstarter in 2020, which makes early access in 2023 something of a result. The original pitch there described it as "An Afrofantasy world" and the inspiration for the game is summed up as "What if Tolkien were black?" 

That said, the very great majority of the rest of the pitch is directly concerned with the role-playing aspects of the game. The setting, which has certainly been the main focus of every news item I've read about it, is less heavily emphasized.

The game's Steam page doesn't actually mention Africa or Afrocentrism at all, although it's implicit in the images and some of the description. The game is very accessibly priced and I'd probably have bought it already if it weren't for the gameplay. It looks to be very much a community-focused, co-operative kind of affair and I used all my spoons for that sort of thing a long time ago. 

I very definitely would like to see more games using backgrounds and settings that aren't a) Europe b) South-East Asia or c) Space and to that end I was very pleased to hear about Wizard 101's latest Spiral world, Walluru. 

To quote the official website: "Inspired by Australia at the turn of the 20th century, Wallaru is the land of the Outback." I'm not entirely convinced by the authenticity of the treatment, given the main focus appears to be "koalas, kangaroos, wallabys, and wombats", which makes it sound more like a Disney special than a fully realised ecosystem but at least it ought to make for some different mob models.

Once again, I'd quite like to see it for myself but the way W101 works I imagine I'd have to play through every other twist on the Spiral to get there, especially given it's "the fourth and final world of Wizard101’s fourth story arc". I think life's too short for all of that or mine's likely to be, at least.

And the third example? Erm... I know there was one but it looks like I didn't think to bookmark it and now I can neither remember what it was nor find it in Feedly. You'll just have to take my word there was another - unless anyone can enlighten us in the comments...

Yesterday's Papers

Remember when I was all excited about the prospects of virtual concert-going? It was back in the pandemic (Remember that?) and the idea of sitting at home tapping a keyboard so my avatar could "dance" to a real-life band seemed like The Future.

I went to a few of those virtual gigs and it definitely was an experience. Just not a particularly visceral one. I'd put it a notch or two above watching festival livestreams, something I've also done a fair amount of over the last couple of years, but well below even the actual live experience of watching a couple of local bands on a stage at a village fete last summer.

At the time, I did feel Fortnite probably had the best chance of making something out of this concept and it seems Epic agrees. It's taken longer than I expected but this week they announced something called the Festival game mode.

I don't play Fortnite. I mean, I have it installed and I've used it but I don't play it. I understand, though, that there are many "modes" you can play. It's not just the OG Battle Royale any more.

Festival is apparently some kind of "rhythm" game. I have a vague idea what that is and I'm pretty sure I would be terrible at it. Hopefully there'll be a way to watch without having to join in. 

The first "headliner" booked to appear in the "entirely music-focused mode" is The Weeknd. I like Abel Tesfaye well enough but I wouldn't patch up and log in just to see an idealised cartoon version of him pretending to perform with a band made up of robots and cuddly toys. Then again, now I type it out..

Anyway, it's all happening in a couple of days. Maybe I'll check it out, maybe I won't. If Fortnite books someone I really like though...

(Once more, isn't this sort of thing the USP VR is looking for? I mean, just look at the huge interest in seeing Taylor Swift and Beyoncé "live" on a flat cinema screen. I dunno. It just seems like a much better use-case for the technology than gaming...)

And that's where I'm going to leave it for now. It's cleared some of the clutter in my pending tray so I'm happy. The rest is just going to have to wait a little longer. I have other things to do. Those EQII crafters won't level themselves, you know.

What? Oh. Oh, yes, I suppose you're right. I do always end these things with a song, don't I? I don't know, I thought I'd probably covered that already, what with Anna and Connie and Abel. But if you insist...

Let's see... Oh, yes! This should do...

 Ur Dad - VIAL

Don't see them headlining a Fortnite Festival any time soon.

Notes on AI used in this post.

Apart from the obvious, just the header image, which is Real Cartoon XL v4's interpretation of Anna Indiana. The actual prompt was "Anna Indiana. AI Singer. Cartoon". All settings were left at default.

Get Good

 

It's not immediately obvious because, typically, it was night-time when I took the shot, but the picture at the head of this post was taken with my new Kamera. 

I say "new". New to me, that is. As far as the game's concerned, it's very much the old Kamera.

I wanted it for the usual reason. It takes a better picture. Or at least a clearer picture. The first Kamera I got, the one I've been using for most of the shots in recent posts, adds a dingy, orange-brown tint around the outside and also sometimes splatters a few faded spots around that may or may not be lens flare. 

To me, they look more like the kind of processing errors I used to get when I took holiday snaps on cheap film with the clunky russian camera my aunt gave me and sent them through the mail, in pre-paid envelopes, to an anonymous box number at some windowless warehouse on an out-of-town industrial estate somewhere in the midlands. We all used to do it. It's so nostalgic there's probably an Instagram filter for it now.

As I said in the post, I was just grateful to have a Kamera at all. It makes for a much more convenient and practical way to take screenshots in Genshin Impact than the regular method. A few brown splotches are a small price to pay. 

I was mildly frustrated that I wasn't able to get the vanilla version, though. Particularly since all the guides I read seemed to think I should. I went back to see Xu several times but he resolutely refused to pop a blue exclamation mark. I decided it was never going to happen and forgot about it.

It's not as though I haven't had plenty else to do in the game. Thanks to that teapot, the one with the "must be AR 35 to enter" sign slapped across the lid, I have a long list of things to be getting on with.

The first hurdle was getting to AR 25. That's as far as you can go before taking a test. I was AR22 when I came back and at first I found it slow going. As is generally the way of things in mmorpgs (Disclaimer: Genshin Impact is not an mmorpg.) progress began to speed up the moment I decided to stop pratting about and buckle down to playing the way the developers intended.

After I'd nailed AR25,  bumped some of the team up to 40 and knocked off Stormterror I did a little research on how to proceed. Luckily for me I'd never tried to level and gear up all of my characters, something that's strongly discouraged, so I hadn't wasted too many resources getting to where I was.

I spent some time considering my options. After a lot of thought and some research on the options I decided to carry on with three of my team and keep one slot open for now. My line-up was going to be:

Traveler - The one I consider to be "my" character. Also the one I feel most comfortable with in combat.

Diluc - Lucky five-star pull. By far my best DPS. Dies too much. Needs to stop doing that.

Kaeya - Very useful cryo skills. Otherwise not really sold on him.

Barbara - Team healer and very good at it. Also the only ranged character in the team.

 

I'd already leveled Traveler, Diluc and Barbara to 40. I took them to try the open-world version of one of the bosses they'd have to beat at the end of the instance that would grant me the right to carry on leveling my Adventure Rank to thirty five, just to get some kind of benchmark.

Things did not go well. I had a think about it and decided I needed to do two things:

1. Ascend my three main characters so they could carry on leveling to fifty. 
2.  Learn how to play.

There was a certain synergy involved. After a good deal of research I found I either already had or was able to obtain all the materials required for Ascension except for Everflame Seeds (for Diluc) and Cleansing Hearts (for Barbara). 

I had everything for Traveler, who for some reason is able to Ascend from 40 to 50 without having to kill any bosses at all. Once I'd figured out how to use the Souvenir Shop and the Alchemy table I was able to bump her up to 43 before I ran out of leveling mats.

For the other two, though, there was nothing for it but to take on some very challenging (to me, anyway) overland bosses. I did some more research, found out where the Pyro Regisvine that drops the seeds hangs out, read the strats for beating it and went to give it a try.

It wasn't a total disaster. The vine was under half health when the last of my four characters died. It definitely felt doable. Most importantly, I could see what I was doing wrong. I was playing like an idiot.

She's obviously seen me fight.

 

Here's the thing. Genshin Impact feels like an mmorpg but it isn't one. It also looks like a button-masher and it's not one of those either. If it reminds me of anything it might be Wizard 101 and for a couple of reasons:

1. It looks like a kids game but it doesn't play like one.
2. Boss fights in Genshin Impact feel like W101 card play on fast-forward.

Once I'd started to think of my characters as cards in a pack it got... no easier to play them at all. That's going to take practice. What did get easier was understanding how they interact. Characters have to set up for each other, using their powers like the cards in W101. All that talk about Elemental Combos was what confused me. Thinking of them as different cards made it much clearer.

Then there's the old consumables issue. I rarely take anything like the necessary advantage of consumables in any game. I'm doing pretty well if I remember to keep a few basic, long-duration buffs up from things like food and drink. 

It was only when I was working out how to use the Alchemy table that I noticed I could make potions. Since my team were singed around the edges from the fight with the vine some fire resist pots seemed like they'd come in useful.

They probably will, too, some time. Not for that fight, though. I went back to give it another try now I'd figured out I needed to do more than just try to weed-whack it death. I forgot to drink the potions but it  went much better anyway. Really very much better. I won. And no-one even died!

 Fine! I'll go back to Mondstadt, then, where I'm appreciated!

Using Barbara much more often, only making her run away instead of just letting her stand there yelping when the vine set her on fire, helped a lot. Ignoring all the guide advice about using Hydro and Cryo on the beatdown phases helped even more. 

This is a lesson I really should have remembered from countless other games. Sometimes you really do have to use specific abilities or classes or characters because some mobs have complete immunity to certain things. Outside of that, though, if it's just that some things do more damage than others, then it's much more nuanced calculation. Kaeya may have the right kind of elemental attack and the vine may take less damage from fire, but Diluc hits so much harder than Kaeya it's still much more effective to let him do the hard burns.

Naturally the blasted vine only dropped one seed. Since I needed two we had to kill it again. Second time, of course, it dropped two so now I have a spare. I also have a level 43 Diluc, which is as far as I got before once again I ran out of mats.

That just leaves Barbara. I took her over to kill the boss that drops the Cleansing Hearts but it didn't go too well. It went about the same as the first fight with the vine, in fact. The boss was on about half health by the time my whole team was dead. Having only one ranged character, against whose attacks the mobs are completely immune, is kind of a problem when they choose to float in the water out of melee range.

I could have carried on but I was distracted by some map marker that I spotted when we revived. It looked as if I had a hand-in in Liyue. I thought I'd do that first so I ported over and as I was running through the streets (the authorities seem to have forgotten all about the Traveler being wanted for suspected deicide, luckily for her and me), who did I happen to spot but my old friend Xu wearing a smart, new blue exclamation point for a hat.

You have got to be kidding me...

 

Long story not as short as it could have been, it turned out he wanted me to help him deliver some snapshots he'd taken on commission and when I'd done that he gave me one of his old Kameras. Why he'd suddenly decided to do that when he didn't even appear to know what a Kamera was every other time I spoke to him I have no idea.

Well, I guess I do have a few ideas. I'm not sure if I already passed him after I dinged AR25. I think I did but I can't be absolutely certain. I might have been on the run from the law at the time, anyway. It's possible the quest is level-gated. It's also possible there's some kind of pre-requisite. I've done quite a lot of stuff since I last spoke to him, including a whole tranche of the main story quest and a bunch of things around Liyue and its environs. Maybe I set some kind of flag.

Whatever, it's done. It happened. I got my Kamera. No more grubby-looking prints. Just nice, clean shots from here on in.

My rough plan going forward is to hold off on Barbara's ascension while I work on easier stuff to accrue plenty of mats so that I can 

1. Level Traveler and Diluc to 50, thereby making the fight with Barbara's boss-mob significantly easier
2. Practice fighting until I am not completely terrible at it
3. Work on improving everyone's gear, some of which could certainly use it.

Also, have some fun. Genshin Impact is a very entertaining game in all kinds of ways of which the fighting is probably the least. It would be a shame to miss the actual good parts just because I need to "git gud". 

And let's face it, I am never going to get good. I'll settle for just good enough.

Pirates Vs Wizards

It's strange how the mind plays tricks. I was sure I'd played Pirate 101 for a little while at launch, given it maybe a couple of sessions to make its mark, decided I didn't much like it and never played it again. Some of that is true.

A comment by Cutie DarkFae on my most recent Wizard 101 post made me wonder whether I oughtn't to take another look. After all, I'd been banging on about how much W101 had changed in the long years since I last played it. MMORPGs tend to do that. How much more might Pirate 101 have changed, given that it was barely formed when I made my judgment? Maybe I'd written it off too quickly.

I downloaded P101 and logged in. KingsIsle certainly make it easy. As with W101 the download took a matter of moments. My login for Wizards worked for Pirates too.

"Adrift" is right. Six years adrift!

I thought I remembered finishing the tutorial and getting to somewhere around Level 5 before I stopped the first time so I was a bit taken aback to see my Pirate was only Level 2. Level 2? Surely that means I'd barely started? In most MMOs made since about 2003 you hit second level pretty much the moment you step out of character creation. Sometimes before.

Fortunately, because I have a blog I can check these things. It's one of the main reasons I do have a blog, in fact. Looking down the insanely long tail of Tags at the foot of the blog I eventually found I'd posted about Pirate 101 precisely twice.

The first time was to mention the game was due to launch on October 15, 2012 and that I was looking forward to playing it. (Leaving aside the P101 aspect, the linked post there is very interesting for all kinds of reasons. I may well revisit it sometime soon for a follow-up - but let's not get sidetracked just yet).

I wish, I wish, I wish the one on the left was my character. Oh well, at least she's my Best First Mate

The second and last time I wrote about Pirate 101 was just two days later. I said I'd played the "Sneak Peak" and finished the Tutorial. Apparently I logged out when I reached Skull Island. It must have taken me all of half an hour, character creation included.

Despite a generally positive tone to the post, which I finished with a cheery, piratical "Looking forward to exploring the Sky Seas with all o' ye!", as far as I can tell I never logged in again. Any memories I had of playing at launch are false. I saw the Tutorial zone in a Sneak Peak two weeks before the game went Live and that was that.

No, really it was worse than that. Based on my experience today, what I saw back then wasn't even the full Tutorial. More like the pre-Tutorial. This afternoon I played for almost two hours, taking my Pirate to the dizzy heights of Level 5, and as far as I can tell I'm still in the Tutorial.

A still from a very strange "animated" cut scene. Not sure about this one at all.

I've written about Tutorials before and no doubt will again. The short version is I'm against them. Nevertheless, I do recognize that they are a necessary evil, the reasons for that being most convincingly and revealingly explained in this Journal entry from We Happy Few. (Incidentally, I recommend the journals and dev blogs from WHF to anyone interested in how games come to be - and especially on how they come to be something other than what they were supposed to be).

Pirate 101, like W101 before it, has the best kind of Tutorial. It's the game. You don't go to a Special Place to do Special Things. You start in the same world you're going to play in later, you talk to the same NPCs, do the same quests, fight the same fights... The only difference is that a voiceover explains what's happening and the UI points out things you need to notice if it looks like you've missed them.

When I played P101 the first time I didn't much like the combat. I didn't say anything about it in the piece I wrote, except to criticize the very concept of ship-to-ship combat, but I do remember quite clearly finding it slow, awkward and annoying.

The movement and action screen for fights is very easy to understand. Must be. I understood it.

Either that's another false memory or six years of development have made for some very significant improvements. This time round I found combat slick, entertaining and well-designed. Like KingsIsle's other game, this one is turn-based. Compared to the average MMO I think it would be more than fair to describe the combat style here as "stately". It's a lot faster than Wizard 101, at least, for which I am very grateful.

Like every MMO, combat begins when you get within aggro range of a mob. When that happens the game grabs the player, grab some mobs, positions them in a face-off , decides who has initiative and Round One begins. Every fight happens in a weird kind of invisible dome. You can see other mobs and players walking by but mobs won't ever join in once combat begins. The only way you can get "adds" is if a passing player decides to help out, which in W101 they can do at any time, whether you like it or not. If that happens the game can add extra mobs to even the odds, so getting "help" can be a mixed blessing.

I'm assuming Pirate 101 works that way too but I can't be sure because in two hours I never saw another player. Whether that's because the entry-level game is dead, or because I happened to have a legacy character on a shard that's become moribund over time, or whether in fact I spent the entire session in a private tutorial instance without knowing it, I really can't say.

Before the main combat/action screen comes this very elegant top-down schematic view.

I don't care much either, not at this stage, because I was too busy having fun. Also trying to catch my breath. It's a while since I played an MMORPG with such a relentless pace. It's not fast yet it's fast. Every time I thought I'd finished a quest it turned out to be just the lead-in to another. There's a strong narrative spine that may, for all I know, extend through the whole game but there are also many side quests, most of them either interesting or amusing.

Came a time when I had just been given my first boat (yes, "boat" not "ship" - that's a plot spoiler - probably shouldn't have mentioned it...). I set sail to chase a double-dealing wharf-rat to his lair, whereupon the plot took an unexpected left turn - and also split into three parts. I picked one at random only to find it promptly split again, sending me to a completely new area, where I met a completely different set of NPCs with a whole new set of problems...

At this point I decided I needed a break. The game clearly had no intention of giving me a clean out so I just camped where I was and came to write this post. It's too early to make any definitive statements - I'm still in the furshlugginer tutorial, for cripe's sake! - but  Cutie DarkFae may have a case: Pirate 101 may indeed be a better game than Wizard 101.

The climax to this Boss fight was so dramatic I have a strong suspicion it was fixed. I was dead, the tough NPC who'd come to help was dead, all my crew except the First Mate were dead. She had about 2% health left. One hit and she'd have been dead too and we'd have lost.
What did Sharkface do? Chose to move three squares instead of hitting her.
Then she shot him and he fell over. Seems legit...

It's certainly better-looking, as well as being faster and more dynamic. In terms of looks, I think W101 stands up well for its age but the screenshots from KingsIsle's sophomore effort show how much more detail there is in the characters. The backdrops, while not all that different, are probably a tad richer too.

There's nothing all that surprising about Pirate 101. It's very much "un game de KingsIsle", an improved iteration of the established formula. The most puzzling thing is why I've never played it since the official launch and why I was so sure I'd given it a fair try and didn't like it, when the evidence proves I hadn't and I did.

The one serious thing wrong with both W101 and P101 is that you can only play a boring human.

I'm very glad to have been nudged into going back for another look. Just goes to show you sometimes do get a second chance to make a first impression.

Time permitting, I intend at least to play through all the free content. It might take me a while but there's no hurry. I've waited six years already.

Add another one to the list.

Aunt Trouble : Wizard 101

Wizard 101 continues to be the MMO I play when I'm not playing Guild Wars 2. This is not a sustainable situation. Currently I find myself with two gaming subscriptions (W101 and Daybreak All Access), which is at least one more subscription than I would like, given there are literally dozens of good, enjoyable MMOs I could play for nothing - including all the ones I'm currently paying for.

I also - somehow - still have an Amazon Prime subscription, which I seem mainly to be using to watch episodes of old tv shows that I already own on DVD, because watching them on a tablet is more convenient than using the portable DVD player I bought specifically to watch them on. This is the beginning of a potentially catastrophic behavioral change that could see me taking out subscriptions to all kinds of things - Netflix, Spotify, Audible... It needs to be nipped in the bud right now.

One thing I categorically do not want to find myself doing is resubscribing to W101 when I get back from holiday in mid-June. The problem is that Wizard 101 is really very good indeed. It was always a much deeper and more involving MMORPG than its reputation as a "kids' game" suggested but after a decade of additions it's turned into a real hidden gem.

It's also hard. Too hard for me.

This is The Maestro. Might be a fox. Maybe a jackal. Definitely Roger Delgado. Just look at the moustache.

This weekend I got as far as the third of the five B.O.X.E.S. The questline took me to MooShu, the zone based on Feudal Japan, if Feudal Japan had been populated by samurai cows and ninja pigs. Zones in W101 don't generally have precise level requirements but MooShu is broadly aimed at the mid-to-high 30s. My wizard is level 41. He finished MooShu (did the main questline and defeated the zone boss) back on the original run so in theory he should be in good shape to handle a quest tuned for the zone.

Should be but isn't. A lot changes in nine years. His gear wasn't great even then, being a jumble of whatever he happened to find while questing, but it looks severely underpowered now. The jewellery has (empty) sockets which I don't think were there last time I looked and nothing he's wearing has a required level higher than the mid-30s.

Added to that he doesn't seem to have spent a Training Point since about Level 10. That was probably intentional. I remember dire warnings about wasting Training Points and waiting until you were max level (50 at the time) before using them. Indeed, that still seems to be the advice. It's Thing #1 on Swordroll's list of Ten Things You Wish You Knew Before Starting Wizard 101.

Lastly, and probably most importantly, I neither have the right cards nor the knowledge and understanding to make best use of the ones I do have. I'm sure that to people who routinely play card-matching games like Hearthstone, let alone MTG, W101's combat system must seem infantile but it flummoxes me.

Victory pose after the defeat of the Boss of the Second B.O.X. That bloody frog did nothing!

I don't really do card games. Legends of Norrath was always a mystery to me. I struggled through the tutorial when LoN first appeared but by the end I had little more idea what I was doing than when I started. What's more, I certainly didn't have the patience to keep trying in the hope the fog might lift.

W101 is self-evidently less complicated than LoN but it still has a plethora of cards, each of which comes with a whole lot of little symbols that probably mean something, only not to me. I'm not sure I ever knew what most of them meant, although I have a vague feeling I did once know more than I do now. I couldn't really have known much less...

Also, back then I duoed with Mrs Bhagpuss whenever either of us ran into something too tough to solo and that made a huge difference. W101 is one of the MMOs that can be soloed but which is easier when you group. (And even as I type I realize that's a very dubious statement, which I may come back to in a later post).

Yeah, you do that, shortie. About time you learned to do something. Other than pose, that is.

The upshot of all this is that a combination of sub-par gear and spells plus a very low skill set is just not cutting it any more. I ran up against a brick wall half-way through The Professor's third quest, when I found myself facing Aunt Eunice, a Level 7 Boss with over 3k HPs, backed up by her Level 7 Elite Rotten Scallywag lackey.

I took her on and lost. Very badly. I fiddled with my deck and demanded a rematch. I lost again. Not quite as badly but badly enough to be embarassing. Third time lucky? No. Had enough humiliation for one evening, thank you, Aunt Eunice.

Instead, I did the sensible thing. I threw money at the problem.

Not real money, although I have a suspicion W101 does have a Pay To Win element via the Crown Store, where you can buy gear and hire Henchmen. No, I went to The Bazaar in Olde Town, where players sell their unwanted loot to each other for in-game Gold.

There was definitely no Bazaar last time I played but if you've seen one bazaar you've seen them all. Fortunately, even though the misleading tag for items that can't be sold via the Bazaar is "No Auction", Kingsisle have gone for the straight "put it up for sale at a fixed price" method. I vastly prefer that to any form of bidding. It's simple and you don't have to wait.

I replaced my Hat, Robe and Shoes for the small cost of about ten percent of my net worth. That mount is looking further away than ever. The result pushed my hit points above 2000, slightly increased my destructive power and left me looking like a banana again.

What is it with this game and yellow? Is it because I'm playing a Myth wizard? Is all Myth gear yellow? I'm going to end up permanently in hock to the seamstress at this rate, I can see that coming.

With the thirty-minute timer on my instance fast expiring I didn't have time to research upgrades for my jewellery or work out where to buy better spells. I went back for another round and this time things went better. I got the Elite down and Aunt Eunice took a few good thumps but the end result was the same. 3-0 to the Aunt.

At that point I decided to call it a night. There's a lot more work to be done. I need to research the jewellery slots and read up on those little icons so I can work out just what it is my cards do. There's a good chance I also need to get a couple more levels. More levels are always goos and if nothing else it'd give me a chance to practice tactics and earn some more Gold for my next trip to the Bazaar.

What's worrying me isn't that I won't be able to improve in all the ways I need to progress. It's that the whole thing is starting to look like a much more serious project than I anticipated when I re-subbed for a month on a whim.

The 5 B.O.X.E.S. event itself is only going to be around for another week or two. I'm not going to finish it no matter what because parts four and five require you to be Level 60 and Level 80 respectively and if I did nothing else for the next fortnight I'd not get that far. This has gone way beyond that event, though. I'm in grave danger of wanting to carry on playing for the sheer fun of it. And that would be very welcome if it wasn't for the whole subscription thing.

I'm going to have to think carefully about this. I'm quite glad of the enforced holiday break, coming right when I'd need to pay the next month's sub.

Hmmm... I thought I was done with this kind of thing five years ago, when F2P took off.

Pony Pony Run Run : Wizard 101

If I wanted to finish Inventory Full off for good, turning it into a Wizard 101 blog would be a pretty good way to go about it. I don't think I've seen anyone in this corner of the blogosphere (can spheres have corners?) mention the game since Tipa stopped posting about it back in 2012. It's a risk but I can only write about what I'm playing (yeah, right...) so here's my third post in a row about the Hogwarts-inspired MMO.

W101 will be ten years old this September. It's notoriously difficult these days to estimate the health of an MMORPG because of all the tricks developers employ to hide any deficiency in population or popularity, but as far as can be told, things seem to be holding up pretty well for a game nearly a decade old.

Certainly the central F2P areas are teeming with players and there are a number of channels or shards or servers (I forget what Kingsisle calls them) to choose from, some of which appear to be "full". Further into the game, past the velvet rope that separates the freeloaders from the paying customers, population thins out somewhat, but then I can only see the low-to-mid game areas, the part of every MMO of a certain age most likely to suffer from de-population. It's highly likely the heavily-populated areas will be at end-game.

With names hidden it's hard to tell who's a player and who's an NPC sometimes.

Canny readers (assuming I have any readers of any degree of mental acuity left) will by now have worked out for themselves that, yes, I re-subscribed. Only for a month and I have already pre-cancelled to prevent an accidental rollover, particularly since I'll be away and unable to play for the two weeks that would otherwise immediately follow renewal, but money has nonetheless changed hands.

It only seemed reasonable. I spent whatever time yesterday I didn't spend out and about in the glorious sunshine, indoors playing the game. Partly what drove me to re-sub was the eye-candy.

W101 is one of those MMOs that features jaw-dropping, attention-grabbing mounts, everything from vintage cars and hoverboards to dragonflies and hydras. After someone sped past me on rollerblades, complete with hip-swaying animation, followed by someone else riding a fox, I decided I'd had enough of jogging around in my unfashionable trainers.

See fox. Want fox.

We didn't have mounts back when I played before so I had no real idea how to get one. I guessed they might be quested or dropped (they are - something to look into in detail later) but if there's a cash shop that's always the first place to try.

It turns out you can rent Temporary mounts that last a week or so via the Crown Store or an NPC but I never feel comfortable on a mount that's going to melt, especially since these particular loaners are hardly cheap anyway. Permanent mounts cost somewhere between 5000C and 15000C which is $10-$30. It's not unreasonable by established MMO practice but still more than I want to spend on a single item in a game I might only play for a couple of weeks.

Some things in W101 can be bought for either Crowns or Gold, the in-game currency. The Crown Store has a tab for paying with Gold but only a small proportion of the items are on it. Even those that are, are also far from obvious. Anyone would think it was done that way on purpose but I'm sure that can't be right...

Do I look like an eight year-old girl?
Don't answer that.

I tracked them down eventually, even if, in the end, I had to resort to yet more googling, wiki-reading and YouTube watching, something that's becoming a definite pattern with this game. Finally, I found some suitable mounts, including one I could afford, although it would nearly have bankrupted me. I have just over 60k Gold from my first run in the game and the cheapest mount, a pony, is 50K. And I don't want a pony.

That got me thinking about how I might make some more Gold. While I was musing on that I did a few quests. First I finished surveying The Commons and got my Range Pole. Then I started clearing out a few old quests from my journal. I ran into a Bear from Grizzleheim and did some errands for him, which unexpectedly gave me a peek at his home world, which I believe was added not that long after I stopped playing.

That in turn started me wondering about all the other, newer Worlds I'd never seen. One thought led to another and next thing I knew I had my wallet out.

With the entire game at my disposal as a paid-up Member, where did I choose to go? Marylebone, the canine version of Victorian London, that's where. Ostensibly I was still clearing out old quests. I did one, then another and then I ran into Sherlock Bones, who had some new mystery on the go.

You can't turn down a request for help from a legend like Sherlock, which is how I found myself an hour and a half into a forty-five minute dungeon, facing a Tier 5 Boss and his T5 Elite henchman. He wasn't even the final boss, either. She was standing on the sidelines, watching, no doubt waiting to provide the coup de grace should I somehow stumble to victory.

Well, there was no chance of that. I'd already had to create myself an entirely new build just to get past the previous two encounters with T4 Elites. I died about four times before I got that right. The T4 Elites had about 1800 HPs each. The T5 Boss had over 5,000.

I was too busy dying to take many combat screenshots.

I tried him once then gave up. Clearly I need to level some more, upgrade my gear, find a whole load of new spells and come to some basic understanding of how to play before I'm going to be of any use to Sherlock as a Baker Street Irregular.

I went back to journal-clearing and had a lot more luck with a different Boss from some old quest I'd forgotten to finish. Things were definitely looking up and I was about to move on to the next step in that chain when I realized I'd been playing for somewhere close to five hours without a break. I'd almost forgotten how that feels.

My memory of Wizard 101 is that it can be both very immersive and addictive and yet tiring and tedious at the same time. It's one of those "just one more try" games, which is fine when the one more try turns out to be the winning turn but not so good when it's just another in a long line of failures.

At the moment, though, it feels fresh and exciting, not least because I have such an enormous amount to learn. I plan on playing as long as it stays fun and stopping when it isn't. First thing on the agenda: make some money.

Hmm. I think that calls for some more googling...

Hooked! : Wizard W101

The cards remain the same but an awful lot has changed since I last played Wizard 101 almost ten years ago. I remember it as a strongly quest-based, combat-focused MMORPG, whose only real alternative to solving problems for NPCs by judicial application of extreme violence was decorating your home castle.

Back then, W101 had a decent, if uninspiring, housing offer and some combat pets to collect and that was about it. There was gear progression of a kind but I don't believe there was any kind of appearance system or transmog, which meant that if you wanted the best stats you ended up looking like you'd been dressed in the dark by your eccentric auntie.

It's entirely possible I'm misremembering some of this. Maybe it was just me. I'm willing to bet that Mrs Bhagpuss's characters looked like they'd stepped staight out of some wizarding fashion magazine, not like Bananaman on dress-down Friday.

Seriously in need of new boots and hat but at least I don't look like a banana any more.

I am pretty sure that last time I played last you couldn't visit an NPC to have your repulsive yellow frock "stitched" into a smart, blue doublet, transposing the good stats of one onto the good looks of the other.. Nor could you take up hobbies and pastimes such as Fishing or Monstrology, both of which I started learning today.

There may or may not have been some form of crafting back then but the plain fact that my character's Crafting panel is enirely blank suggests it's another major game element that's been added since. There's also Gardening now and I'm positive that wasn't a thing back in my day.

I'm still waiting on Wilhelm's long-promised Guide To Fishing In MMOs. If and when it appears it's going to need to be pretty lengthy because fishing seems to be the one non-combat activity almost every MMORPG feels beholden to shoehorn in somewhere. (Except GW2, of course, because ANet took some kind of MMO purity vow long ago, the only exception being for the team that makes stuff for Evon Gnashblade's Cash Shop Emporium).

Is that fish on the right laughing at me?

Fishing in W101 follows a familiar enough pattern. First you find a place where fish live. Water is a good start. Then you open your special Fishing UI with your Fishing spell bar (you are a Wizard, remember).

You cast your fishing lure and watch it bob about while fish swim past, ignoring it. You recast it a few times until you realize you have no control over where it lands. Eventually a fish bumps into it by accident, the lure glows then submerges and you frantically hit the spacebar to hook it.

Apart from EverQuest, where you just stand there, and EQ2, where "fishing" means harvesting a node like any other, every fishing mini-game I have ever played in an MMO works approximately as above. There are all kinds of bells and whistles (literally sometimes) that come into play as you level up your skill and earn, discover or buy new lures, floats, rods, hooks, bait and gear but in essence it always comes down to pressing a button to cast and pressing another to strike. Occasionally, if the game in question prides itrself on realism and added immersive value, you might have to keep pressing a third button to reel your catch in.

Screenshot taken before I figured out how to block names.

Fishing in MMOs doesn't need to be original: it's already ridiculously addictive. I have lost too many hours in too many MMOs to mention, standing at the water's edge pressing two buttons or sometimes clicking the mouse, just to see my bag fill up with worthless vendor loot. Sometimes there's treasure, because everyone who's ever been fishing in real life knows how you can often hook a pirate's forgotten stash of gold doubloons or haul up a motorcycle that still works.

This time, I got a chest on about my seventh or eighth cast. It had over a thousand gold coins inside, plus a weapon and something I forget. That's the sort of catch that keeps you by the riverside until the stars come out. Then again, I'm not quite sure how useful gold is in W101 because, when I went to get my hideous hat stitched, after I'd had the Seamstress fix my even more hideous robe, I found I needed the cash shop currency, Crowns.

I'd had a hundred or so on me and used them for the frock swap without realizing I'd done it. Now I have to decide whether to pay some actual cash for more so I can finish my makeover. Probably going to do that. They're very reasonably priced - you can get 5000 Crowns for $10 and the stitching is only 100C a time.

Reasonable rates, swift stitching!

Fishing was easy enough to learn but I failed utterly in working out how to open my Angler's Tome, wherein the records of every fish I ever catch are supposedly recorded. I couldn't find the damn tome, let alone read it.

I tried every corner of the UI, opened every tab, checked while I was fishing as well as when I wasn't. I googled and read wikis and guides. I even watched a YouTube video. As far as I can tell the icon for the Tome is simply missing from my display but I'm sure it's because I'm doing something wrong.

I had almost as much trouble with the first quest in Monstrology. I picked that one up from a fox who happened to be standing outside my own School, Myth, in Ravenwood. I was looking for an uncluttered backdrop to take a screenshot of my new, blue robes when I saw him. Her. Them.

Knowing how W101 works this probably is supposed to be Edmund Burke, in which case maybe that accent was meant to be Irish. Pretty much impossible to tell...

Monstrologist Burke, who hails from the Spiral world of Albion, looks distinctly masculine in figure and dress but speaks in a strangely high, piping register, while essaying quite the worst attempt at a "Scottish" accent I've heard since... well, the launch of EQ2.

Seriously, have these voice actors ever even heard a Scottish person? It's hard to believe they could have and still come up with something this awful. As always, all the Rs are getting a thorough roll as we take a wild trip around the Celtic fringe, spending a good deal of our time in Ireland and some of it, quite possibly, in the Lousiana swamplands. I'd laugh but I've heard this particular joke too many times already.

I'm blaming the accent for making me flip through the quest dialog too quickly to take in all the highly complicated instructions. There were diagrams. There may have been a flow chart. Perhaps the reason W101 is considered a kid-friendly MMO is that it often feels like being back at school. There's certainly enough technical detail here to fill a semester or two plus a full set of finals.

Trial and error, otherwise known as blind luck, always gets you there in the end.

Which I would fail. Not only could I not find my Angler's Tome but it took me something like a dozen fights to get my Extract Essence spell to function properly. Once again I had to check everything in game twice, re-read the quest dialog, study the illustrations, google it and watch a YouTube video. And I still got it wrong.

Finally - finally! - I managed to enchant my combat spell with my Extract Essence spell correctly and then cast the enchanted attack on the right mob. I'd completed step one of the tutorial for a mini game in a kids' MMO. What a sense of achievement! Seriously, I'm not kidding, it really was...

I'm no further along in my quest to find the Five B.O.X.E.S but I may have hooked myself all over again. I'm very curious to see some of the new worlds that have been added to the Spiral since I left, which would mean re-subbing. Even if I don't go that far, there's evidently plenty of new fun to discover in the free world.

In fact, if the speculations of Swordroll - a W101 blogger I discovered in my desperate search for guidance and who I promptly added to my blogroll - prove correct, the free to play areas themselves may be about to see a major revamp. That should be worth hanging around for. I'm off to do some surveying so I can get my Range Pole before the builders move in.

Professor Who? : Wizard 101

When I go through the list of MMORPGs that both Mrs Bhagpuss and I played together for a significant period of time, there's one that I often forget to mention. Wizard 101.

We didn't play for all that long - it can't have been more than a few months - but it was our main MMO for a while and we both really enjoyed it. We left The Spiral before I began this blog and although there are a couple of mentions of it here and there, I've never actually posted anything specifically about the game before.

The reason I'm writing about W101 now is entirely due to a news squib I spotted on Massively OP a few days ago. As has been well rehearsed here, I have ambivalent feelings about MOP, which sometimes appears to be run by and for people who actively dislike the genre, but I have never questioned its worth as an aggregator of valuable and reliable news about the hobby.

Without that news item I would probably never have found out that Kingsisle are running a three-week event called The Five B.O.X.E.S. featuring a very (very!) thinly-disguised version of The Doctor from the (very!) long-running BBC series Dr. Who. I would have been quite annoyed had I found out too late to go see it for myself so thanks, MOP.

I'm no Whovian. I can't even name all the Doctors in order - not these days, when there seem to be hundreds of them. I just like Dr. Who and have done since I watched the first episode when it was broadcast in the early 1960s. I also like crossovers and mash-ups so when I read Syp's pleasantly non-ironic, non-sarcastic piece it seemed like it might be a good idea to go check the event out in person.

Returning to an MMO you haven't played in a long while can be anything from annoying to traumatic but going back to Wizard 101 couldn't have been easier. I found my old log in details and entered them on the website. My account was there, all in good order, exactly as I left it.

I pondered whther to re-sub for a month. W101 has possibly the best range of payment options of any MMO, ranging from F2P across the base game, through piecemeal Buy-to-Play options on all content as and when required, to a full sub giving unrestricted access to everything.

I thought that if I was going to play through the new content on my existing character I might need to be subbed to get to the higher zones. The description of the event on the W101 website suggests that you can start in various places according to your character's level and when I stopped playing back in 2009 my wizard was in the low '40s. Back then, that was just a few levels short of the cap. Of course the cap has moved since then - I think it's 80 now.

Before deciding whether to open up my wallet, I thought I'd download the game, log in and re-orient myself. Downloading and updating took about five minutes - very slick, like the entire Kingsisle operation. I reset my graphics options from the best I could do back in 2009 to something suitable for nearly a decade later and stepped out into Wizard City Commons.

Everything looked much as I remembered it. Looking around, I saw The Professor, standing not twenty yards away from me. The Professor is, of course, The Doctor. He's also a dog, which is taking regeneration at least an order of magnitude further than the actual show's current culture-quaking gender switch.

There's no mistaking the influence here. The Professor isn't merely Doctoresque, he's the canine spitting image of a very specific Doctor, namely the fourth, as portrayed by Tom Baker. I'm not entirely sure Tom Baker ever went out in public wearing converse high-tops, mind you, but the rest of the outfit is spot on.

I grabbed the quest. I'd forgotten that everything in W101 is fully voice-acted. Whoever voiced The Professor has even made an attempt to sound like Tom Baker. It's not a great impression, I think it's only fair to say, but it's recognizeable.

By the time I'd followed the little yellow arrow to the first B.O.X. I was beginning to ask myself at what point homage ends and plagiarism begins. Then again, if J.K Rowling hasn't complained... The B.O.X. is, of course, a T.A.R.D.I.S. and it doesn't just look like The Doctor's police box from the outside either. Inside it's a dead ringer.

The Professor could hardly be "The Professor" without a companion and he has one. Standing around inside the B.O.X. looking decorative is Rose Piper, another dog whose name might ring a bell. She doesn't seem to have much of a function beyond acting as the vendor for the event but that makes her more use than some Companions I could name.

After another chat with The Prof some plot ensued. It was actually rather good. Like most W101 narrative content I've seen it's refreshingly clear, comprehensible and straightforward. The game is nominally aimed at children so many of the worst excesses of the genre are pared away...

... Or so you'd think. What I'd forgotten is that W101 is, at heart, a surprsingly hardcore, combat-intense game with the old-school expectations of an MMO that was created well over a decade ago. For example, when you enter a dungeon you get an estimate of how long it will take to complete. You also get a warning that if you don't complete it in a single run you will have to start again from the beginning.

The novice-level solo quest dungeon I was about to undertake came with an estimated completion time of 45 minutes. You can leave the dungeon (to resupply for example) and it will save your progress for when you re-enter, but only for a maximum of half an hour and you have to stay in-game. If you log out, your dungeon's history.

Compare that with EQ2: solo instances there last for up to three days and you can come and go or log in and out as much as you want. Also, even at end game, 45 minutes would be considered a fairly lengthy run. If W101 is for kids then it's for kids with plenty of patience and a good attention span. Not to mention bladder control.

I was somewhat apprehensive about jumping into combat. I figured I'd get my clock cleaned in short
order as I was trying to remember the basic mechanics, let alone what my cards did. In fact, although I did lose the first fight, by the time I died most of the essentials had come back to me. I won the re-match and every subsequent battle - although one came right down to the wire.

Combat in W101 was always enjoyable, which is just as well because there's a lot of it and none of it's easy to avoid. The animations are fantastic although they do become less impressive by the thousandth time you see them and I imagine many players long for a "hide animation" option, if only to speed things up.

After the best part of a decade I was very happy to see old favorites like the giant toad and the gravedigger, not to mention my trusty troll sidekick. I was surprised how quickly I remembered them and more importantly what they did and when best to play them.

The whole thing did indeed wrap up in around three-quarters of an hour. I successfully corrected the timeline and unmasked the nefarious villain. He, naturally, turned out to be the mere catspaw of the real villain, The Maestro. Subtle, eh? (And who else was it going to be, if this is the fourth Doctor? Well, ok, I suppose it could have been Davros...). I spoke to The Prof and the first part of the adventure concluded.

It was all jolly good fun. I haven't yet returned to The Spiral to find out if I can carry on for free (there are five B.O.X.E.S. so presumably another four chapters of the story to go, although only three of them are within the level range I can handle). If it turns out only the taster was free and the rest comes at a cost, well I had a good enough time that I'm very willing to sub for a month to see the rest and have a general run around to see what else has been added since I last visited.

Plus I really - really - need to do something about that hideous yellow bath-robe I've been wearing for the last nine years ...

Pirates Ahoy! : Pirate 101

Sneak Peak for Pirate 101 is on as I write. Just popped in long enough to do the tutorial, reach Skull Island and take these few screenshots. 

Character creation is a question and answer session very similar to Guild Wars 2. My parents were eaten by a squid and I was raised by the dogs of Marleybone. Tarzan out of 20 Leagues Under The Sea!

Combat animations on the Stork companion were exceptionally impressive. Only to be expected given Wizard 101's similar set pieces. I imagine you'll get to see these hundreds, probably thousands of times so they need to be good!

Ship-to-ship combat is never my favorite thing and even here, in the tutorial of a lighthearted game aimed at a young audience, I thought it was a bit slow and labored. Not sure it can ever be anything else - its always two ships going in circles until one sinks, isn't it?

And here we are on Skull Island. That's a lot of pirates! Looking forward to exploring the Sky Seas with all o' ye!